Tech – Nima Darabi

Reflecting on Amazon’s new HQ in New York

We are entering an era in which companies dream of becoming cities.

They will fail, almost certainly.

A company can not mimic a city without being as dynamic and as self-organized, even if it surpasses a city in size or revenue by a large margin; companies have a naturally shorter lifespan.

This happens since cities have the freedom of a bottom-up flow, coupled with certain network properties that are vital for a superorganism to adapt to the environmental changes. Corporations cannot always stir fast with the moves of the market (elaboration for another post). They are a different animal. Obesity kills them eventually if they don’t die a natural death.

Due to structural differences, after a certain level of growth companies experience decline in their rate of “innovation” – the very glue that holds cities together. Unlike cities and forests their synergy will eventually stop and reverse, then they can not carry their own weight unless they innovate and disrupt. Companies can not scale forever.

* * *

And can tech giants innovate proportional to their growing size, i.e. with a so-called “superlinear” rate?

No, not passed a certain size. Not with a gigantic mass, a top-down flow and a compartmentalized structure. For these giants to grow bigger than this, for them to be worth trillions or to become cities and last, they need to revolutionize their structure. But they simply don’t have the code for it.

Of course innovation will keep taking place in megacities but increasingly outside these campuses, even if they try to attach themselves to megacities like Amazon is trying to land on New York’s metropolitan area.

What tech giants should do at this point is to downsize their mass, their physical manifestation, lay off and restructure, then grow again but that is not how public companies are ruled. Their leaders may well be aware of this better than the average shareholder, but neither have a better next possible move on the board. They are accustomed to follow a natural course for the evolution of the mega-creatures they are shaping. And in that course there is no prospect of keeping the pace of the innovation. This is not about the talent-base; this is a structural failure and it’s emergent.

* * *

What are these companies going to do with their facilites when doomed by their nature they have to let go of their extra load?

In the most organized and systematic scenario, these buildings will be taken over by a new generation of emerging insitutions and reused for different purposes than they are built for. So they better design them with flexibility.

In another foreseeable future our kids shall play techno in their abandoned halls, or whatever fusion the spirit ot their time will be!

And I think this will happen no later than a couple of decades, perhaps gradually. Doesn’t need to be any apocalyptic scenario, system collapse, war or political revolution.

I will place a long-term bet on this one too.

Printing a megacity in the desert?

Can you print a megacity in a desert and demand it to return your investment?

“Dimensionality” in complex networks is still an ignored concept in any other discipline which deals with those networks – but physics, the mother of them all.

In city planning for example, governments can aspire to make a metropole of 9 million and expect it to behave like NYC, once it matures. If not necessarily reproducing the same financial or political influence, but at least creating a similar “feel” internally shouldn’t be much to ask?

Not true.

It is essential to build megacities from smaller organic elements: minor towns already in each others’ neighbourhood.

Is such a simple observation in other, similar, networks something that the policymakers of some trillion-dollar future megacities are unaware of? And do they not need that knowledge when they expect the return for their investment?

* * *

Building new fresh sustainable megacities in uninhabitable fields sounds like a brilliant idea. The trend has many great promises:

For one it shall massively returns the investment through real estate. It will laso host the future waves of urbanizing population while built with the state-of-the-art and more sustainable infrastructure. Even better, if it is built in a desert where preserving the natural ecosystem is much less vital than say, a rainforest.

But sustaining a megacity logistically is not possible without sustaining it culturally. That is the foundation of the city life and for it is necessary to mimic the underlying dimensionality of organic metros – something that should match the metropolis’ magnitude – or else the megacity will never produce the effects of cities of even much smaller magnitude, no matter how much money is spent on central planning.

* * *

Even if the best engineers set up the physical infrastructures and plug in the vital resources and the structures are built with fresher and more sustainable technology with a smaller footprint, there are still fundamental problems in printing a city in the middle of nowhere with a “grid mindset”.

The good news is though, it could take just a little more investment but in the right direction to try to recreate a “dimensionality” that typically evolves over centuries when a megacity is organically seeded.

Only then one can attempt to create the equivalent of some several centuries old institutions in the course of years.

China has understood this and they are building their megacities around the existing smaller parts. Much smaller cities like Dubai or Doha have also grown their skyline organically – though on steroid – around an existing old town.

Predicting Cryptocurrencies

My naive analysis of cryptocurrencies based on the publicly available data (historic price of the major coins) inferred four key parameters to model a typical crash:

– The magnitude of the latest bubble.
– Length of the inflation period.
– The speed of deflation measured by the powerlaw exponent of the decay curve.
– The length of the deflation period.

On the flight back from New York City (have to look up the date but it was early January this year) looking at the 11 major crashes in the history of cryptos, the rather simple model predicted that:

The market may crash at any moment. (It did in a week, but could go on a little longer too).

And that at the current market cap ($800B at the time) a following crash will, in a period of 6 months to one year:
– Deflate to a market cap of $150B for all cryptos.
– 4,500$ for Bitcoin (17,000$ at the time)
– 200$ for Ethereum (1,200$ at the time)

And I said I will buy when two of the three goals are met.

So far (9 months through) one of the three has taken place (Ethereum hit 170$ yesterday).

You’re welcome!

We are moving towards an eternal AI dictatorship

It’s already in the process. We are already slaves of some self-organized technological super-intelligence, made of flesh and silicon, which is beyond all of us. It’s just many of them out there fighting over us as resources and the evolutionary battle hasn’t been settled just yet.

So let’s reflect on these doomsday scenarios:

We tend to undermine the algorithmic nature of the world, and so the wide variety of scopes and the vast magnitudes of scales that evolution can rule, beyond biology. This is an old story: Trees made us to be their pollinating agents and we cut them down. We made AIs to serve us and they will eventually enslave us.

So those who predict an AI take over are right, but their doomsday scenario isn’t like a Terminator story. It isn’t even about automated weapons.A ‘God-like’ AI is a true threat. But it doesn’t need to be a robot, a super computer, or a conventional AI.

The rulers of future earth will have algorithmic nature. But let’s reflect on that now:

First of all, algorithms do not run in a metaphysical layer seperated from our tangible world. Algorithms need *stuff* to run on; They will still need flesh and silicon.

The truth is, we are already slaves of self-organized algorithmic beings higher than ourselves; The technological end legal entities that interact with each other and the machinery of our civilization as examples. These superorganisms beyond any individual’s power have evolved an order, a system, and dictate what we should do. They rule us, own us, embed and encompass us; We are like cells in their bodies.

What are exactly these algorithmic super-organisms? Very difficult to pin point.

If we could spot and name them, we would still view them as vague concepts entangled with each other like a spaghetti, rather than detached physical objects. I don’t think from our perspective we can define these superorganisms as separate entities like the conventional organisms that we know, but that doesn’t make them any less real. And more far-fetched this wouldn’t stop those Gods from perceiving themselves and each other as separate entities in their layer of existence.

We can, however, with our limited understandings, identify concepts such as organizations, nation-states, political parties or corporations. But there is much more complexity that goes above our heads when we include all the algorithmic functionalities within and in between them. The key to tell them apart is to look at their algorithmic functions.

It is really these entities who make wars, invent alphabet, or send objects to Mars, not individual leaders, inventors or visionaries. These entities could have consistent habits or patterns like our personality traits.

Such algorithmic gods and masters are beyond our understanding as we are beyond our cells. We are just a small part of them. And they are intelligent too. More than us or less, is difficult to tell. They are operating at different scales and deal with different problems for the survival of their code. Are we more intelligent than our cells? What about the cancerous ones? If so how one of them can kill us?

I think we already are slaves of some god-like beings that are in their infancy and are co-evolving with us. And it shouldn’t be surprising if their greed for domination and survival as an emergent property, accelerates out of our control and if we find ourselves captured in a deterministic ordered that we built together, while there is no way out.

We have experienced this situation before. With the idols, commandments, money, cities and legal systems we have previously made codes that became stronger than us. These codes are already our masters, exhibiting recognizable patterns taking us to wars and situations beyond the decisions of any CEO, king or emperor.

And I think of AI threat along the same lines, only on steroid. AI is scary because it runs on increasingly faster platforms and can accelerate since it may gain the power to make itself exponentially smarter.

When it comes to what matters to us, things like individual freedom, what is worrying about AI is that it can make the grip of such evolving superorganisms much tighter who have their own selfish codes to for example minimize a cost-functions or to optimize for a goal, that be money, growth, profit, order, anything.

While nature is at its own game, the bad news for us may be that our current welfare and freedom can last for only a short moment in the history. That the privileged position of the enlightened modern man may be just a temporary behavior of one of these algorithmic entities going through a phase transition.

So these fuzzy philosophical speculations aside, I think what makes AI dangerous is something like this:

* * *

Technology has transformed us. As our individual survival depends more and more on the interaction with technology, we are gaining some freedom while losing some. Our functions are changing rapidly.

We are already not free to think with our own individual brains. Are we? The dominant codes, wide-spread systems and algorithms are dictating how we should think. What questions should be asked and what options are out there. How we should model the world, how we should think how to live. Call these forces the society, economy, media, culture; They have rules and systems and we get our thinking patterns from them. The most successful of them have evolved to copy themselves like programs in our heads and they are ruling us already.

We see now that smartphones controlled from small brain-like power hubs and control panels in the tech giants already control the masses. But they even control the CEOs of the those giants in some way. You see when these powerful individuals seem to be in full control, how suddenly desperate they become in the face of unforeseen challenges?

This is just one decade of smartphones taking over our lives. Soon enough we will even have chips in our brains and implants will replace screens and touch-pads. So it would be much easier to control us, and voluntarily even.

Environmentally, almost all wild animals who did not follow the new order are gone already and only us the tamed ones are left. Some of us domesticated animals will be the the pigs locked up in the slaughter house. Some would be workers trapped somewhere else to provide electricity to those facilities. Some of us would be more free programming the machinery, some are following someone elses’ orders, who gets order from another one, who is somewhat voted by us through the propaganda that is fed to us by . No one’s really free already.

Who wrote all these code? No body as far as we know. We all together did it and it evolved with us. And it’s there now anyway. AI can only make us voluntarily head to make such a destiny much faster. Because it potentially knows us way better than we do ourselves.

We can’t even say if this scenario is good or bad. It just is. I think there’s no right or wrong at this scale.

Good or bad, I think a kidney cell can never go back to float freely in the wild Precambrian oceans of the earth like its ancestors did. Not after it evolved to enjoy the economy of scale and its existence dependent to interact with the rest of the body.

We may be heading to uncertain futures like this that find ourselves increasingly *locked up*, if not physically but algorithmically, to run functions that deals with our very survival. It sounds deterministic and sad. But we are heading that way already. I think AI could only make it faster and could come up with new creatures that would blow our current minds.

There is one thing for sure. What we are experiencing now is anything but a state of equilibrium, so we are heading to something peculiar. We humans as the catalyzers of this process may try to stir it so that the to-be-established future order wouldn’t be so painful for our species. Although I doubt if we can manage.

Complex Crypto

I just thought of an algebraic suggestion to extend the domain of traditional money with the use of crypto currency.

How about we make a new currency: ComplexCoin! Its value would be like a combination of a major FIAT currency as the real value (💶) and a major crypto coin (👾) as the imaginary value. (Don’t get offended if you are a crypto enthusiast; There’s nothing more real about real numbers compared to the imaginary ones. Afterall these are concpets that mathematicians use to model and conomists can follow too.)

To use the ComplexCoin (i-Coin?) we need to make new pricing models in especial online or brick and mortar stores that sell stuff at complex prices. The pricing is stable because it shall be regulated to depend only on the complex cost of producing or acquiring the goods, and not the volatile exchange rate between the two types of currencies.

So if you have an A+Bi amount of cash in your bank account and you want to buy an item at the complex price of a+bi your account will be charged so you are left with (A-a)i+(B-b) i-Coins. As simple as that.

What matters is that the price of the goods are set by the manufacturer/distributer based only upon the complex cost of the items, all the way from mining and production to wholesale and retail.

This is meant to keep the rates more stable to help adopting cryptocurrencies in our daily lives, so it is important that at the event of purchase the exchange between the real and imaginary values shouldn’t be permitted. Of course people can in their digital bank accounts exchange between the two currencies if exchange rates are unstable.

For example, if an apple (🍎) cost a farmer 1£ and 1 Ripple they typically sell it to the wholesalers with a certain profit(say 100% would make it 2£ and 2Ripples). But even if 1 Ripple is 1£ at the time of purchase, the terminal can not charge 4£, or 4 Ripples, altough they are equal at the time of the transaction.

There can be exceptions where the terminals charges you one of the currencies when the buyer runs out of the other one, for the transaction to go through after prompting.

Also when a transaction fee is applied (purchasing abroad or cashing out at ATM), it can be charged not as a percentage of the magnitude (as it is already the case for our real-axis FIAT currencies), but instead as an angular rotation that will be profitable for the cash terminal, based on the current exchange rate between the two axes.

* * *

There may be a lot of problems and challanges for this to work obviously, but it was worth sharing. At worst, think of it as yet another coin, which creates its niche to stand out by the use of a mathematical concept instead of breeding kitties!

I just wonder if people are going to buy shares in a bank that issues this token, would that be an ICO? IPO? (i-CO or ICPO?)

My flight is taking off now and no Internet on-board this time. I shared my idea. Share your opinions here!

Tech and Emotions

We pitched our HappIt app at Disrupt London 2014 and it didn’t take off. Our submission was immature and so was the tech savvy hackathon to understand some of its ellaborated features. It used facial expressions instead of text, had a social element to encourage emotional data logging, and used five-dimensional motion charts for visualization of historic emotions.

Two years later, same event, same city and eventually tech realizes the value of an independent platform dedicated to emotional data collection and analysis. Congratulation to Emotion Journal for wining the Disrupt London 2016 hackathon grand prize. It is a victory for promoting genuine psychometry in tech and they did it with a one-diensional donut chart!

Now the tricky discussion is always around the data collection medium. How do you fish for emotional data? How do you ask people how they feel?

This team has an implicit approach based on natural language processing. First a speech recognition module and then a sentiment analysis algorithm.

The catch is that the phonetic language did not evolve to capture or communicate human emotions at the first place. We had faces to do that. Double-articulated language evolved partly to fake those feelings even.

Right now as you read this, even if you knew me very well, you have no clue whether I write this in a state of happiness, jealousy, dissapointment, hope, anger, shame or pride and now by lining up these keywords I have made it even harder for the sentiment analysis algorithm to capture my real feelings. Technical challanges of parsing such as negation handling and so forth are not the main problems in this area.

I’d argue that facial expression is a better alternative to capture emotions, whether an implicit analysis of an actual selfie, or an explicit drawing of a simple emoticon on a smart watch in a crowded subway.

But of course a hybrid approach combining insights from all different channels (and for example taking voice intonations into account), would be ideal. Until that day, one thing I agree here the way they said it:

“If you do it once a day you can see a visual representation of your feelings and experiences over time.”

So, whichever future app you will use to log your emotions, remember to “happ” it!

Make it a happy habbit.

Technology and the Substantiality of Experience

Melvin Sokolsky - from the bubble series — Melvin Sokolsky – from the bubble series

Technology is a great thing [for us humans], but it has a negative aspect not many talk about.

It deprives us from feeling the “real experience” in accordance to how we are biologically wired. Technology builds a protective bubble around the human body that however takes care of a lot of challenges for us, leaves us peculiarly unchallanged inside. And to elaborate a bit more on the “challange of unchallended”, it unemploys and unsues the sensorimotor circuitry in our pre-historic brains. And since we percieve happiness more directly inside our brains than on the surface of our skin or outside our bodies, this can be enough to spoil a good deal of fun for us.

In many cases technology offers the same functionality for our survival needs, but with less substance. Same outcome, less work for it. But what if “working for it” was a part of the satisfaction, that was planted in us by evolution to keep us motivated to persue tasks vital for our survival?

The main reason we have brains is sensorimotor circuitry. Some researchers claim it is the only reason. As organisms we need to act upon the world for our survival (the motor system) and in order to do that correctly we need to sense it by a sensory system. So the motor act is the primary goal and the sensory is secondary; it is needed only for the motor act to be decided correctly. Nature doesn’t care if you observe the details of the environment perfectly. Your gene code is passed on if you survive.

Now the technology sits in the way by enhancing the sensory channel and empowering the motor act. It eases the deeply emotional process of decision making, and by doing so leaves those circuitry unused and unemployed. But hasn this not made us unhappy? I used to think that technology enhances feelings and emotions since it assists and magnifies the sensory channel but at our core we are not passive sensors. We are active performers of our lives and spoiled in the comfort of our civilization we have truly lost our natural reference of comparison to our bodily similar ancestors. Lots of process that used to happen in our brains now takes place outside our bodies. Most of the signals that we used to constantly process and handle for survival does not reach the surface of our skins or don’t come even close to us. People go to the nature or gym, try extreme sports or play video games to experience those situations and trigger those condditions; It is a retro movement.

We have all heard modern-time complains about how people nowadays use digital messages instead of real ink on paper postcards, navigate the reality with GPS, and now get dates from apps without holding face-to-face conversations. The outcome is the same; conveying the message, mating or reprodution, or getting to a destination. But something is missing during the process.

Now, this familiar contemporary observations may be worrisome, but it is nothing new.

The technological dumb-down of mankind even if admitted is usually associated to the modern times. This seems to be a new trend in a couple of generations, if we take our own norms and typical lifestyles as the ultimate base for the real experience. Much of “the real experience” had already been taken away from us and before that from our ancestors for dozens of millenia:

* People express worry these days that driving skills, the real experience of navigating the roads is going to fade away with self-driving cars. But do we remember how horse riding felt before cars? Or did our horse-rider ancestors know what they were missing not to hunt an animal while running after it, barefoot?

* Spending too much time in the digital conversations and dealing with only letters and emojis makes us deaf to the intonations of the spoken language. The ability to grasp the meanings conveyed in the rise and fall of the pitch and loudness of the speech needs to be practiced. But was it not the verbal language itself that provided a parallel channel of communication and made us blind to the previous forms of communication, such as reading of emtions from facial expressions? How often do we even try to read each other’s eyes nowadays? In such intuitive social skills that were vital for tribal survival, our illiterate ancestors were more intelligent than us.

* Youth nowadays get dates for their digital profiles sometimes without composing a sentence, or having to make a face-to-face charm. An Irish man in Trondheim told me once “There was a time that people couldn’t hide behind dating profiles. You had to show up in person in real places and talk to real people and prove yourself”. As if a bar is a gladiator arena, or the spoken language itself, just like dating profiles, is not used for people to hide behind. This complain is sound but to me sounds like we would complain to our grand children: “There was a time that you couldn’t just telepathically go through a hundred thousand profiles with the chip in your brain to get a mutual date. You actually had to open an app, a real app! And had to go through profiles one by one. And you had to chat with them, for real. Like composing sentences word by word to make a connection. And then there was still a high chance that they wouldn’t match you because it was not pre-calculated!”

Much of our sensorimotor circuits are inactive since their function is outsourced to the technology. And I think that comes in an order. First the motor act, the outcome of the whole process gets outsourced and inactive, since the machinary around us does it on our behalf. Then there’s no longer need for the sensory part and so that part gets dull and dormant too.

Your worry may be right. The new generation gets spoiled by the new technology and loses the real feel of an experience. They are handed in something as functional but less sensational; less powerful, engaging, and real. Just like we were.

We know it, by comparison.
Our parents knew it, by comparison.
Their parents knew it, …

It’s been fifty thousand years folks!

The Merger

dragon

I could write this in a thousand and one narratives, but tonight is the “merger” narrative. This is because this week two telecom giants merged together. Another merger, indifferent from anybody’s struggle to stop them.

This time 85 billion dollars. Let this number sink in a bit and then try to see the pattern here. You have seen it if you follow the global business news regularly:

Mergers are getting more and more frequent.
The acquisition prices get exponentially higher.
The industries involved get more diverse, which means more aspects of our lives is going under monopoly.
The rules that used to control and stop the mergers and guarrantee a minimal competition keep getting weaker by corporate lobbyists and bribed politicians.

What do we expect from these dynamics? They will slowly kill the competition and change our norms and habits. The pace of changing our internal habbits like the external environmental changes are not fast enough to be seen by the naked eye. It’s like staring at the hour hand of the clock; A 100x time-lapse can reveal it. Actually that was a while ago. We are talking about undergoing an exponential change so a 10x time-lapse is enough to make it visible for us, what change is happening around, and inside us.

But we are extremely adaptive creatures. We collectively conform to the norms around us and if they change, we change with them. What mergers do with those norms, is that when they get enormous enough to take over a whole industry at a globel scale, they kill the competition and unify the decision making between previously copeting entities. If one of the giants starts poisoning you, the other one will make a scandal out of it. But not if both are controlled behind the same dashboard. Can we comprehend the dangers here?

Megamergers are slowly changing our lifestyles, the food we eat and what it contains, the information we get, the politicians that rule us, everything! They can already predict and influence some of the decisions we collectively make and they won’t let you notice it. They think in statistics and you are just data points in their analysis. It is not even a month passed from Monsanto/Bayer merger that broke the historic world record of acquisitions at an stonning price of $65B, that this one silently came along with $85B. Can we extrapolate such an exponential growth and see what is waiting for us? Should we be suprised in three years witnessing a half a trillion dollars merger between an already merged food/retail company and another giant social network/media multinational corporate?

Let us fast forward this, fellow frogs:

Fighting cancer gets harder when it passes a certain level. Confronting mergers is increasingly harder when they get to such an gigantic size. Still, we may have a chance to bleck them now or regulate them more by antitrust regulators, but if we keep failing and wait longer, there comes a point that we cannot change the irreversible. That day we will see more clearly what is going to happen, but we will not have the power to stop it.

If things go as they are, in the course of decades if not years, the whole civilization as we know it will be acquired by one (not two) multi trillion dollar super-company or the coalition of multinational corpotations. Then their ultimate board does whatever they want with us data points. And they will have the means to do that, because we will be totally numb by then.

Did you actually follow me this far? Most people typically fail to care to this depth since they are already numb.

But you know that I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. Right? When I say “the board” I don’t mean the mysterious bad guys who are sitting and plotting the apocalypse right now. Or whatever Illuminati. Don’t buy into those naive theories. Conspiracy theories, most of them, are for the kind hearts and simple minds.

Nature is not designed. It is organized on its own, based on simple rules. And it repeats the same patterns over and over. Nature is full of collapses and Doomdays and apocalyptic events. Big and small in all scales. These collapses are smaller babies of the big bang, only reversed:

Reversed in the sense that more and more things will happen in shorter and shorter times!

Our apocalypse will have many faces. “The merger” is one of those one thousand and one faces. The merger is a “winner take all” game. It is a race and we are all in it, but we don’t know who will win, however, there will be a winner. And many many losers. No one can predict who eats whom at the end of the game, but that will eventually turn out. And everyone will be surprised.

Even the people who may think they are conspirist themselves. Even those who think they are the bad guys.

There is a power above us all; It’s cancer. It’s nature. It’s evolution.

I haven’t spoiled the movie for you yet, and I guarrantee it will be full of surprises that none of us can foresee.

Good night. Till another night of the 1001 night.

Leave services when they get huge

I think this is worth a 100$, but only if it works the way I want it to:
I need an “Esc” button to set my life free from any company that has grown bigger than a certain size and that can control my habbits, decisions and lifestyle, and shows tendency to do so, and to use controlling me as a customer to grow even bigger.

I am happy with the already purchased MacBook, although it was a forced choice in the absence of a true competition and among non-existing alternatives previously killed by giants like Apple.

But instead I will not check my Facebook feed today (Apple and Facebook are both in the range of 100 billion to one Trillion dollars worth companies).

P.S. Since this is copied from Facebook: Facebook’s AI machines should (if they already don’t) identify this post as not in line with the company’s profits and adjust the parameters to limit its spread. Next, they should discover obvious patterns of some million profiles like mine, that [for some unimportant reasons] do not contribute to the companies metrics which are supposed to drive profit fot them. So they should start adding us to a dynamic blacklist until we come back normal and contribute to those short-term metrics again.

Revolution or Reform?

Imagine this hypothetical landscape: You live in 2300. Humanity is still around and somehow through calculated global programs, colonizing mars or deadly wars has reduced its earth population from ten down to three billion already. And has fixed it there. The earth is tolerably warm but sustained.

Politics:

Countries are provinces of the world federal government and they have different state rules to practice their local cultural differences.
Different races campaign politically to defend the continuation of their gene traits and complaining about the others reproducing more than regulated.
The word “freedom” has mixed meanings and is used with the word “from” not to be misunderstood.

Economy:

There is no centralized money and even digital currency is just a hidden layer of the world economy that some expert may still look at.
People use public services more than their private properties, however that’s a cultural thing; Everyone is given a minimum of private ownership by birth, and several times during their life span. People can lose their private stuff accidentally or choose to donate it at will, however the world welfare system may restore it for them.

There is a notion of money, but that is negative (like debt) which is calculated by an individual’s cost of living such as their footprint as long as it is calculably affected by their personal choices.
Therefore there is no money. There is fine.

Business:

Growth of companies are limited through regulating their shareholder’s wealth. New-capitalism is practiced safely.
Work is constitutional right but voluntary and companies act more like temporary social games shaped by entrepreneurs and closed and cashed out once they serve their purpose. Land and land resources, infrastructure, utilities, transport and media belong to the public and can not be bought by companies or other legal entities by the world constitution.

Every citizen is granted an equivalent of some work/office space and work equipment after a certain age. They can use the equivalent of their office space for individual business or they can exchange it with an equivalent of that when they get a job or build a company.
Education is too a constitutional right and voluntary. People get educated to fit the available work opportunities. Public education is accessible globally and private education is the service that educational companies serve.

Democracy:

Terms above are regulated by the world federal government, which is a distributed post-digital consensus system on the Internet. Democracy is not a hard-coded system and is a complicated structure for collective decision making by humans (and partly even by pets and rightful animals). It senses and collects data from different levels of humans’ lives and aggregate it organically to sense what people want (implicit voting) and thus regulates the society democratically. It’s optimisation will be focused on human’s psychological level and it’s well being. Feeling good is a constitutional right. Citizens get notified about the important updates of their local or federal rules depending on importance and relevance to their lives, and can always overwrite their predicted vote or temporarily exit the decision-making networks voluntarily. Politicians, lawyers and developers aid the machine. General assemblies are held by politicians who are themselves through the machine. Newer versions of democracies are be deployed. All citizens of the world have constitutional right to access the overall simulations and predictions that the system provide based upon the latest rules. Cultural differences will be shaped by local rules decided by the local people at the time. Climate, genetic differences and culture will self-organise the world to a peaceful multicultural equilibrium.

Legal system:

Over-scaling is a unified crime. Occupying other’s territories, violence, killing of rightful beings, exceeding the individual footprint limit, are all forms of over-scaling and will be fined by custody or private property depending on the degree of crime. People scale for sport in the virtual world.

Celebrities:

Plato, Darwin and Mandelbrot are more famous than Einstein. Few nerds know Obama. No body knows Kanye West. But there’s this terrible dancing monkey all over the fucking virtual world.

Other species:

People talk to pets through chips and devices. Eating animals (and humans!) is highly regulated and lab-grown meat (and a lot of other lab food) has taken off. People consume them according to their fashion, taste and lifestyle.

Animals or humans are not being slaughtered in the real world unless there is a legal warrant or a specific type of digital authorization signed for it. Of course people (and pets) still cheat when you don’t see them, but machines watch, warn and stop the cheaters who kill “rightful animals” illegally. There are debates around the definition of that term. Say there is a list including mammals and big land animals. There are debates and protests to include or exclude a certain species.

In Spain (or north Africa?) they still chase bulls in a safer and non-fatal form of bullfighting. And those who love fishing have to go to, let’s say china, because it’s still legal there.

Parenthood:

There are still families, although people are free to live in different social settings and move on to new groups. This will be reinforced by cultural differences in each region and the cultural differences will be maintained.

Psychology:

People take things for granted. They are civilized and they behave but they can easily get depressed and die a fragile life if they get isolated. It’s called “laziside”.
People have become even lazier than us in a sense that they have outsourced their surviving “actions” to the technology and thus they have also outsourced many of their “sensations” because keeping them is not crucial. Shortly, many sensorimotor functions of the brain are practically outsourced to the machines and that’s worrisome due to the depression and numbness that it creates.

Sport:

For the reason mentioned above, “nature gyms” are all around and somewhat mandatory to train people to practice their sensations in the absence of some practical technologies. Professional sports have become intellectual. People compete over their “nature gym” skills by using their physical, social and cognitive skills to show off that they are best. There are cognitive games in the “nature gyms” where people look into each other’s eyes to read feelings and stuff like that. Sex comes to sport with different forms of convertors.

Architecture:

Nature and civilization are mixed up technologically. Buildings breathe and cities are self-sustained. Rooms rotate and change size and adapt with the light conditions democratically by the wishes of people in them.

The list goes on.

A future landscape that is missing a lot of unimaginable technological advances or their cultural artefacts. Just one in a zillion possibilities. Just fantasize and expand it on your own vision.

Then, question:

Is it fun? Should we start talking about a scenery like this? If yes, should we discuss how we should act accordingly to move towards something like this? And not further away from it? Should we wait till machines do it for us?

Or should we – really painfully – go extinct?